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Former Van Vleck Assistant Professor Malabika Pramani has been appointed as Director of the Banff International Research Station as of July 1, 2020.

She was in Madison between 2001 and 2004. She joined the University of British Columbia in 2006. A mathematical analyst, her research interests cover Euclidean harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, partial differential equations and several complex variables.

Lorenzo Najt studies algorithms that can build a large group of maps for a state, predict their outcomes, then compare those to the map that legislators selected. He works with UW–Madison mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg as well as associate professor Justin Solomon and postdoctoral associate Daryl DeFord at MIT.

“What if we had a big bag of all the different maps that you could have?” Najt explained. “If we reached our hand in and took out maps randomly and then compared them to the one that you proposed, maybe your map would look extremely unusual in terms of its partisan advantage.

Much of the discussion about the coronavirus comes from mathematical models about how they expect the coronavirus to behave. Professor Jordan Ellenberg has been discussing mathematical models of coronavirus in several online forums.

Qin Li has been working with other researchers here at the UW to combat coronavirus. She is part of a group of researchers, led by UW Geography Professor Song Gao, using cell phone tracking data to model traveling and the spread of the coronavirus. Li will use the team’s data to inform mathematical models of the spread of COVID-19.

“We want people to take action to further prevent or mitigate the threat of the virus,” Gao says. “Our development of a COVID-19 spread model will be community-centered, which incorporates community responses into both the model development and the model interpretation process.”